A million little lies

What is the publishing industry to do when it transpires a biography or memoir is full of lies? The publisher of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces offered purchasers a refund, and now Lance Armstrong's autobiographies are raising classification questions at some libraries. But is it possible these works can tell us more about these individuals now that we know the truth? Bethanie Blanchard writes.

In the long lead-up to the Lance Armstrong confession, I kept hearing (like some sort of terrible earworm) variations of the same joke: that Lance Armstrong's books should be reclassified as fiction.

Occasionally I'd see photos on social media in which someone had gone into a bookshop and helpfully placed a copy of one of the cyclist's books beneath a prominent sign on the fiction shelves, all to much hilarity and self-congratulation.

And so, inevitably, the news came that a library in Sydney had done the same, with a sign notifying its customers that all Armstrong's books would be moved to the fiction section. The sign, with its smiley-faced conclusion, turned out unsurprisingly to be a prank, "put up 'as a bit of a joke' by a young university student who worked casual shifts at the library on weekends".

The Manly Library's spokesperson noted that the student "didn't have any authority to make a statement on behalf of the library" and that the "library could not recategorise Lance Armstrong's books without receiving instructions from Libraries Australia".

Students: Don't f-ck with the Dewey Decimal System, was the message.

The whole incident was fairly amusing, but like all jokes, came from a very real feeling - in this case, one of betrayal. It's the word that comes up again and again in accounts of the doping scandal, and is the crux of the whole sordid affair.

Betrayal of the sport. Betrayal of his team mates. Betrayal of his fans, of cancer survivors who were inspired by him, of his charity, of his sponsors.

But should the classification of a work as non-fiction change when we later find that elements of it are untrue? Does a work of non-fiction containing lies tip it automatically into the fictional?

It was in the much anticipated interview with Oprah that Armstrong finally confessed to what everyone had already suspected: that he had systematically, and over a long period, used performance-enhancing drugs, rendering illegitimate all of his purported achievements, and ultimately the contents of all his published 'non-fiction' books.

Yet, this is not the first time one of Oprah's interviewees has fallen down the rabbit hole to this strange space of 'fictional-non-fiction'.

Indeed, the whole affair has echoes of the 'Million Little Lies' scandal, when James Frey famously sent the literary world into a flurry when it was revealed that his account of his drug addicted past A Million Little Pieces - described in its press release as 'brutally honest' and topping the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks after Oprah endorsed it in her book club - went beyond the sort of aggrandisement characteristic of autobiography, into the outright fictional.

As The Smoking Gun investigation explosively reported in 2006, Frey had either "wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states'."

Memoirists are afforded a certain poetic license to embroider the truth in the interests of storytelling, written as their works are to be read publicly - this is after all autobiography, not diary. And yet the level of fabrication and misrepresentation in the works of Frey and Armstrong go rather beyond mere embellishment.

Cases such as Frey's and Armstrong's cannot be said to fall into the long and proud tradition of literary hoaxes either. Though their works deceived, such deception was clearly not aimed to make a wider satirical point. Their books therefore occupy some other, greyer area.

In Armstrong's case, the lie was so all-encompassing, questions over the categorisation of his books are, to put it mildly, the least of his concerns. The lies that seeped into his autobiographies were little more than a symptom and extension of the lie that was engulfing his entire life and career.

The difficulty for memoirs written by someone like Armstrong is that they are clearly not books that sell on their literary merits. Unlike Frey, who did have the defence of artistry (spurious as that claim may be) and who has argued that he wished to write transgressively - "If Picasso painted a Cubist self-portrait… nobody would say it didn't look like him" - Armstrong's books are of interest to publishers and readers only because of the truth of the stories they tell about his life. As an athlete, no-one is interested in Armstrong's turn of phrase, we're interested in his 'inspirational journey' and more importantly, his success. Truth is fundamentally important, otherwise he's just some guy on a bike.

Frankly, I don't even care… I don't care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It's just a book. It's just a story. It's just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I've broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.

But most people do care about the 'thing on the side of the book'. So what was the eventual outcome for Frey? Aside from the confession, the second Oprah interview in which he was publicly eviscerated, the apology et al. Publisher Random House (in what I still think is an extraordinary move) agreed to refund anyone who had purchased the book and felt genuinely deceived by Frey, but would have to sign a sworn statement that they bought the book believing it to be a memoir. Yet, fewer than 2,000 ever claimed the money, and to this day the book remains classified as non-fiction, with only the Brooklyn Public Library recataloguing it as fiction.

So I find myself wanting to argue for not f-cking with the Dewey Decimal System too. To me, Armstrong's books, in particular It's Not About The Bike and Every Second Counts, become more interesting given what we now know. The works are both more tragic - or, depending on your point of view, more despicable - precisely where they are.

In a Note To The Reader in subsequent editions of A Million Little Pieces, Frey wrote:

People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal...My mistake... is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.

Armstrong too is guilty of writing about the person he 'created to help himself cope'. Non-fiction is indeed where the works should stay, on the row of shelves marked autobiography - as a testament to the intricate web of fabrication that ultimately engulfed him, the million little lies he, too, told the world about himself.